In a major shift to try to save a five-year farm bill, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) said Friday he is now prepared to compromise on the commodity title and accept target price supports important to Southern producers and their allies in Congress.

“I’m willing to compromise on whatever they think they can get through and live with in regard to target prices,” Roberts told POLITICO. “Because I have to have the crop insurance or my guys are really going to suffer.”

As the ranking Republican on the Senate Agriculture Committee, Roberts’ resistance to target prices has been a significant roadblock to getting a final deal with the House. His increased flexibility now opens the door to staff negotiations over the commodity title and follows a meeting Thursday of the top four House and Senate farm bill leaders together with Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.

It was at that session apparently that Roberts first explicitly spelled out his new position to House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas (R-Okla.). Efforts to follow up with staff talks got off to a rocky start Thursday night, but there was still hope that discussions could begin soon given the pressure to complete a farm bill before the end of next month.

Coming out of the Vilsack meeting, the consensus among all four top House and Senate agriculture players appears to be that they must make a last effort to come up with something that might be included in a year-end deficit reduction package.

The Senate bill approved in June promised about $24 billion in 10-year savings; Lucas reported a bill in July with about $35 billion in savings over the same period. He has been stymied since because of Speaker John Boehner’s refusal to bring the package to the floor. But if a compromise could be reached in the range of $33 billion, for example, it might be an attractive item for Boehner and President Barack Obama as they try to navigate the year-end fiscal crisis.

In White House talks, Obama has signaled a greater willingness to consider more savings from food stamps as part of the farm package. And as the farm bill’s authors compete for the leadership’s attention, savings from crop insurance — by trimming premium subsidies — are in the mix.

But for Roberts, an early advocate of crop insurance in Congress, the core program and improvements made in the Senate bill are hugely important given the severe weather his own growers have endured at home.

“There are a lot of things in the five-year farm bill that are absolutely essential,” Roberts said in the interview. “For me it’s crop insurance, because we’ve been through a two-year drought and now we’re headed for three. We would just be in terrible shape if we didn’t keep the improvements to crop insurance.”

“That’s where we are and there shouldn’t be any fuss” about the commodity title, he said. “There is all this talk of the South vs. the rest of the country, or to be more accurate, me. I’m willing to compromise.”

“It’s a typical situation where you get to the eleventh hour and 59th minute you wake up and realize there will be no bill,” he said of the state of negotiations now. And even if a deal is reached, he admits a lot will depend of hitching a ride on whatever agreement Obama and Boehner may reach on the larger tax and spending fight.

“You’re out there in the great American desert looking for your horse,” Roberts said. “How do you get to water?”